Seoul Botanic Park

I typically greatly enjoy botanical gardens. Hence, if there’s one in a city I’m visiting and I’m there during a season when the flora is unlikely to be comatose, I usually visit it. Seoul has the Seoul Botanic Park. Today is my last full day in Seoul. So, today it was.

Going to the Seoul Botanic Park required something of a commitment. It’s about an hour from my hotel by transit. I’m not a patient person.

(There’s a difference between being patient and being persistent. I’m moderately persistent, but I have very little patience. People often mistake my willingness to see a task through to the end as patience. It’s not. I might stew silently as I plod through the overly long task, but, appearance notwithstanding, I hate every second it takes. I persisted through the journey to the park.)

The Seoul Botanic Park isn’t huge, but they pack a lot into it.

Where I entered, there’s a large grass field. When I was there, a group of people were practicing yoga to calming music. That was enjoyable enough to see, but it would have been far more entertaining if it were, instead of a group of people, say, a group of pachyderms practicing yoga to calming music.

Past the field, there is a small forested area. It was nice, but it was neither large nor dense enough to be particularly tranquil. Plus, as is the case throughout the Seoul Botanical Garden Park, the mid-rise buildings surrounding the park were visible from among the trees. So it wasn’t enough to make me feel I was out in nature.

Seoul Botanic Park Conservatory

The Seoul Botanic Park features a conservatory. Just to be clear, that’s not a conservatory as in a college for the study of music or other arts, such as the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. It’s a conservatory, as in a greenhouse.

You probably figured that out because it’s in the Seoul Botanic Park. But people are perfectly free to place a music college in the midst of a botanical garden. So I felt I needed to be specific about that.

Now that I think about it, when I said “people are perfectly free to …,” don’t take that too literally. If you proceed to erect a music conservatory in a public park of any kind without seeking permission or even consulting the city, the city might get upset. I know you’re itching to do it, but don’t.

The rest of the Seoul Botanic Park is free to roam around, but there is an entry fee for the conservatory and the outdoor botanic garden next door. That is, there’s a fee unless you’re having a near-death experience, in which case it’s free. A near-death experience is defined as being 65 or older.

The conservatory has a pleasing shape to it, with a concave glass ceiling. It has tropical and Mediterranean zones, with plants from a variety of countries within.

There is also a “skywalk” that meanders through the conservatory about one floor up. It affords views down to the floor of the conservatory, and allows you to look at some of the trees at branch level rather than trunk level.

Walking along the skywalk is mandatory, not optional. Understand, I’m not saying that it’s so fantastic that there’s no way you’d want to miss it. I’m saying that the conservatory insists upon it. The entrance to the conservatory isn’t also its exit. The exit is at the end of the skywalk.

Pictures from the skywalk in the conservatory in Seoul Botanic Park:

Outdoor Botanic Garden

The outdoor botanic garden at the Seoul Botanic Park is, as I said, right beside the conservatory. But to visit it, you have to leave the conservatory and walk a piece around it from the exit to the garden entrance. Scanning the same ticket (free or otherwise) you use to get into the conservatory opens the gate to the garden.

The garden is beautiful. There were lots of brightly coloured flowers in full bloom today, April 18. There are a few small ponds. (All of them were fishless as far as I could see. Sorry. It’s not my fault.)

One of the ponds had a densely populated band of lush flowers bursting with colour, different colours in different patches, all the way around the banks of the pond. It was beautiful.

There’s a small hill in the botanical garden. I climbed up it. From there, I saw that the Seoul Botanic Park has a small lake. I knew the park had a lake. It was clearly visible on the park map I looked at by the park entrance. However, by the time I got to the botanical garden, I’d forgotten about it. The view from the hill reminded me of it, although it is outside the fence surrounding the botanical garden.

Oh, the botanical garden has a small rose garden. Of all of the flowers in the garden, the roses were the only ones that I saw that weren’t in bloom today. There wasn’t a single blossom on the bushes.

I said the roses were the only flowers not in bloom. Perhaps some annuals don’t get transplanted into the garden until later in the season, but how would I know? I ask you that. How would I know?

More pictures from the botanical garden in Seoul Botanic Park:

The Lake

After leaving the botanical garden, I walked over to the nearby small lake. It’s off to one side of the park and at the far end from where I entered. I was impressed with one side of the lake, but not the other.

One side has grassy banks with lots of trees. The other side has a hard-surface shore that meets the lake at a sharp right angle, with only a few trees on the other side of the walkway immediately beside the lake. I walked along the path by the nice shore for a piece. Then I turned around, walked back the length of the park, descended into the metro, and headed back into the central part of the city.

I had a pleasant morning at the Seoul Botanic Garden.

Aside

Priority Seats

I’ve ridden the Seoul metro often while I’ve been here. Most cars in the trains, maybe all, have one or two benches of three seats each labelled as priority seats. If I understand the pictogram on the signs above them, the following people are supposed to be given priority for those seats:

• Someone who has a crutch that can stand erect on its own, coming close to, but not touching, the hand or any other part of the person’s body.
• Someone who has a cane with the same power.
• Someone with a ski ramp growing out of their belly.
• Or someone with an infant who can levitate ever so slightly above the seated person’s lap.

It’s possible I misinterpreted the pictogram. I included a picture. You figure it out for yourself.

The sign says they are priority seats, not strictly reserved seats. And people who don’t fit one of those categories will sit there if there isn’t a priority person around. Apparently, whatever the correct interpretation is, I don’t fit the categories because I’ve never had anyone sitting there without seemingly having a priority to do so offer me a seat.

In addition to those priority seats, I haven’t seen it in every metro train I’ve been in, but on at least one or two lines, the cars have single seats, distributed at I don’t know what frequency throughout the cars, that are pink. There’s a sign on the floor in front of each of them that isn’t a pictogram, but rather text in Korean and English.

The English asks to keep that seat vacant for a pregnant woman. It doesn’t mention a specific pregnant woman, so I imagine any pregnant woman will do.

As I said, I haven’t seen those pink seats in every car, but for the few times I have, they’ve always been empty. And in a couple of cases, the car was otherwise full. Non-pregnant people don’t sit there and then get up if a pregnant woman happens by. They just leave the seat vacant.

I think Seoul desperately needs to increase its birthrate so it can put those seats to productive use.